Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  JIM BUTCHER was born in Missouri in 1971. An avid martial artist and horse rider, Jim began writing as a child. He wrote Storm Front, the first volume in the New York Times bestselling Harry Dresden series, as an exercise for a writing course when he was twenty-five. He spent two years trying to find a publisher for the book, and it appeared to great acclaim in 2000. It was followed by twelve more novels and a short-story collection, and was adapted for television by the Sci Fi Channel in 2007. A graphic novel based on the series was nominated for the Hugo Award in 2009. Jim is also the author of the Codex Alera series of fantasy novels.

  ISOBELLE CARMODY wrote her first book, Obernewtyn, when she was fourteen, so she knows very well how powerful someone can be regardless of their age. She learned everything she knows about writing from telling stories to her seven brothers and sisters and still feels the pleasure of binding an audience to her tale. She is best known for her highly acclaimed eight-volume Obernewtyn Chronicles series, Scatterlings, and the CBC Book of the Year Award winner The Gathering. She has received awards for her short stories and books, including the Golden Aurealis Award for Alyzon Whitestarr. Isobelle also edited the anthology The Wilful Eye (with Nan McNab). She divides her time between her home on the Great Ocean Road in Australia and an apartment in Prague with her partner, who is a poet and jazz musician, and her daughter, who, when asked what she wants to be when she grows up, says, dazzlingly, “Everything.”

  CHARLES DE LINT is a full-time writer and musician who lives in Ottawa, Canada. Having published thirty-six novels and thirty-five books of short fiction, he is a pioneer and master of the contemporary fantasy genre. Other books include his young adult novel, The Painted Boy; a short-story collection, The Very Best of Charles de Lint; and The Mystery of Grace, an adult novel. Charles is currently at work on a new young adult series, and has released Old Blue Truck, a CD of his original Americana story songs.

  NEIL GAIMAN was born in England and worked as a freelance journalist before coediting Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Kim Newman) and writing Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion. He started writing graphic novels and comics with Violent Cases in 1987; with the seventy-five installments of the award-winning series The Sandman, he established himself as one of the most important comics writers of his generation. His first novel, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), appeared in 1991, and was followed by Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and Anansi Boys. His most recent novel is The Graveyard Book. Neil’s work has won the Caldecott, Newbery, Hugo, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, Locus, Geffen, International Horror Guild, Mythopoeic, and Will Eisner Comic Industry awards. He lives near Minneapolis.

  FRANCES HARDINGE was brought up in a sequence of small, sinister English villages, and spent a number of formative years living in a Gothic-looking, mouse-infested hilltop house in Kent. She studied English language and literature at Oxford, fell in love with the city’s crazed archaic beauty, and never found a good enough reason to leave.

  While working full-time as a technical author for a software company, she started writing her first children’s novel, Fly by Night, and was with difficulty persuaded to submit the manuscript to a publisher. Fly by Night went on to win the Branford Boase Award, and was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award. Her subsequent books, Verdigris Deep (Well Witched in the United States), Gullstruck Island (The Lost Conspiracy in the United States), and Twilight Robbery (Fly Trap in the United States), are also aimed at children and young adults.

  Frances is seldom seen without her hat and is addicted to volcanoes.

  ELLEN KLAGES is the author of two acclaimed novels for young adults: The Green Glass Sea, which won the Scott O’Dell Award, the New Mexico Book Award, and the Lopez Award; and White Sands, Red Menace, which won the California and New Mexico Book Awards. Her short stories have been published in eight countries and have been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and Campbell awards; some appear in her collection, Portable Childhoods. Her story “Basement Magic” won a Nebula Award in 2005. She lives in San Francisco, in a small house full of strange and wondrous things, including a puppet or two.

  ELLEN KUSHNER grew up in Cleveland, but spent second grade in France, which marked her for life, mostly in good ways. Her first novel, Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners, introduced the world to her imaginary city (with its notorious Riverside district), to which she has returned in The Fall of the Kings (with Delia Sherman), The Privilege of the Sword, and a growing collection of short stories. Her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer, won the Mythopoeic Award and the World Fantasy Award. Ellen edited Welcome to Bordertown with Holly Black. She has taught writing at the Clarion and Odyssey workshops, and at Hollins University. Ellen used to live in Boston, where she was a host on WGBH public radio, and created the national series Sound & Spirit. She now lives in Manhattan, on Riverside Drive, with her partner, the author and editor Delia Sherman. She loves to travel, and hates to sort through piles of paper, which is a shame, as she has so many of them.

  Ellen wishes to thank all the wonderful Finns she now calls friends, who first lured her to their shores with an invitation to FinnCon, then squired her around their amazingly beautiful country with unbounded, gracious hospitality, and whose answers to her many questions—from “What would a country tailor keep in his pack?” to “What are Finnish witches, anyway?”—made this story possible. She hopes they and their compatriots do not mind too much the considerable liberties she took with known facts about Elias Lönnrot and the Kalevala.

  MARGO LANAGAN lives in Sydney. Her four collections of short stories (White Time, Black Juice, Red Spikes, and Yellowcake) have won and been shortlisted for many awards, as has her novel Tender Morsels. She has won four World Fantasy Awards (for short story, novella, collection, and novel) and has been on the Tiptree Honor List twice. She is not actually a witch.

  TANITH LEE was born in North London and didn’t learn to read—she is dyslexic—until she was almost eight (and then only because her father taught her). This opened up the world of books, and by age nine she was writing. Tanith worked in various jobs—shop assistant, waitress, librarian, clerk—and spent a year at art college. In 1974, DAW Books, under the leadership of Donald A. Wollheim, bought and published her first novel, The Birthgrave, and thereafter twenty-six of her novels and collections.

  Since then Tanith has written ninety books and almost three hundred short stories. Four of her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC; she also wrote two episodes for the TV series Blake’s 7. Some of her stories regularly get read on radio.

  In 1992 she married the writer-artist-photographer John Kaiine, her companion since 1987. They live on the Sussex Weald, near the sea, in a house full of books and plants, with two black-and-white overlords called cats.

  PATRICIA A. McKILLIP was born in Salem, Oregon, received an MA in English literature from San Jose State University, and has been writing ever since. She has published fantasy novels for adults and young adults, among them the World Fantasy Award winner The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. Her other works include Ombria in Shadow and Solstice Wood, both of which won the Mythopoeic Award, and the short-story collection Harrowing the Dragon. She won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2008. She and her husband, poet David Lunde, live on the Oregon coast.

  GARTH NIX grew up in Canberra, Australia. When he turned nineteen, he left to drive around the United Kingdom in a beat-up Austin with a boot full of books and a Silver Reed typewriter. Despite a wheel’s literally falling off the car, he survived to return to Australia and study at the University of Canberra. He has since worked as a bookshop publicist, a publisher’s sales representative, an editor, a literary agent, and a public relations and marketing consultant. His first story was published in 1984 and was followed by the novels The Ragwitch, Sabriel, Shade’s Children, Lirael, and Abhorsen; the six-book young adult fantasy series The Seventh Tower; the seven-book series The Keys to the Kingdom; and Troubletwisters (cowritten with Sean
Williams). He lives in Sydney with his wife and their two children.

  DIANA PETERFREUND is the author of eight novels for adults and teens, including the Secret Society Girl series, the fantasy novels Rampant and Ascendant, and the postapocalyptic For Darkness Shows the Stars, as well as several short stories and critical essays on popular children’s fiction. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, and her short stories have been on the Locus Recommended Reading lists and anthologized in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, her daughter, and her dog, Rio. Like Malou in “Stray Magic,” Diana loves animals and volunteers with rescue organizations that foster shelter dogs.

  TIM PRATT’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy, and other nice places. His short stories are collected in Little Gods and Hart and Boot and Other Stories. His work has won a Hugo Award and has been nominated for World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula awards. He blogs intermittently at timpratt.org, where you can also find links to many of his stories. Tim is also a senior editor at Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, writer Heather Shaw, and their son, River.

  M. RICKERT grew up in Fredonia, Wisconsin. When she was eighteen, she moved to California, where she worked at Disneyland. She still has fond memories of selling balloons there. After many years (and through the sort of “odd series of events” that describe much of her life), she got a job as a kindergarten teacher in a small private school for gifted children. She worked there for almost a decade, then left to pursue her life as a writer. Her short fiction, which has been awarded World Fantasy and Crawford awards, has been collected in Map of Dreams and Holiday.

  DELIA SHERMAN was born in Tokyo and brought up in New York City. She has spent a lot of time in schools of one kind or another. Her first novel, Through a Brazen Mirror, led to a nomination for the Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer. Her second novel, The Porcelain Dove, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Mythopoeic Award. Her short stories for younger readers have appeared in numerous anthologies. “CATNYP,” a story of a magical New York Between, inspired her first novel for children, Changeling, and its sequel, The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen. Her novel The Freedom Maze, a time-travel fantasy set in Louisiana, was published in 2011.

  Delia lives with fellow author and fantasist Ellen Kushner in a rambling apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City. She is a social rather than solitary writer and can work anywhere, which is a good thing because she loves to travel, and if she couldn’t write on airplanes and in noisy cafés, she’d never get anything done.

  JANE YOLEN, often called the Hans Christian Andersen of America, is the author of over three hundred books, including Owl Moon, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night? Jane’s books range from rhymed picture books and baby board books through middle-grade fiction, poetry collections, nonfiction, and novels and story collections for young adults and adults. She has won the Nebula Award twice, has won the World Fantasy Grand Master Award, and has been named a Grand Master of science fiction/fantasy poetry by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Six colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates, and her Skylark Award, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set her good coat on fire.